Hundreds Roma from Shutka live in misery: without water, electricity and in a landfill

The article is taken from www.novatv.mk

No water, electricity and in a huge landfill live hundreds of Roma in the street “Brsjachka buna” in the municipality Shuto Orizari. While millions are thrown for monuments in the centre of Skopje, the Roma who live in miserable conditions are only a few kilometres away, say the citizens of Shuto Orizari.

In the neighbourhood, known as “Brsjachka buna”, are around 100 children who don’t go to school because they don’t have money, they don’t have water to bathe and no clean clothes for school. The citizens say that the whole neighbourhood fills water only from two hand pumps.

“We have no drinking water, neither for cooking, washing and bathing. We work all day, collect bottles, plastic and iron in order to survive. When I come home I cook with dirty hands because I don’t have any water to wash them. Our children get sick from scabies and tuberculosis, because we don’t have water,” says a citizen from “Brsjachka buna” for NOVA.

The citizens say that they have no water or electricity.

“We live very badly, without canalisation and water for bathing. Our children are dirty and with louses and we don’t let them go to school because they chase them away from there. A few children from the neighbourhood have jaundice. No one cares about us, we don’t even have social welfare”, says a citizen from “Brsjachka buna”.

Selmani Kimeta says that she lives with two sick children in very bad living conditions.

“We have no drinking water, but when it rains we live under water. We don’t have any living conditions, I too want to live a normal life with my children, like anyone else”, says Kimeta. Demirovski Dzevair explains that he, his wife and their three underage children have been sleeping on the ground for several days because their house gets flooded when it rains.

“I do not have a good roof, or a solid ground; when it rains the ground leaks water like a volcano. We currently sleep on the ground; we do not even have a carpet to put on the ground, nor blankets to cover ourselves while sleeping. This is pitiful life”, says Demirovski.

The municipality Shuto Orizari says that the will begin the water supply project in the following period, including the most problematic street “Brsjachka buna”.

“In collaboration with the Ministry of finance and the City of Skopje, the municipality of Shuto Orizari has arranged a construction of a new water supply network that will fully meet the needs of the municipality of Shuto Orizari for the next 50 years. The project’s value is 3.6 million EUR, and the municipality of Shuto Orizari will participate with 500 000 EUR. The existing water supply network was built in 1963 and it is not sufficient for the basic needs of the citizens. The investment in this capital project has a huge significance, because it is inconceivable for citizens in a municipality with around 40 thousand inhabitants in the 21st century, which is located only a few kilometres from the city centre, not to have drinking water”, says the municipality.

The Roma continue to leave the country due to the poor socio-economic condition. Therefore there were demonstrations in Stuttgart held by human rights organisations, because the new bill, proposed by the German government, declares Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina as unsafe countries.

This means that the requests for asylum in Germany from the citizens of these countries can be rejected in a speedy manner as “obviously unfounded”. This will affect the Roma above all, since they are considered as economic refugees by the Berlin government, or people who seek salvation from bad living conditions. The ruling politicians are constantly trying to impose this simplification to the public as an argument in favour of the new law, reports Deutsche Welle in Macedonian.

The organisations for human rights and protection of refugees consider this law as utterly incorrect. The organisation “Pro Asyl” published information about the situation of Roma in Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which are presented in the reports of the Commission on Human Rights of the Council of Europe, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United States, OSCE, the European Commission, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, as well as numerous organisations and media.

The organisation “Amnesty International” agrees with the assessment that if Roma don’t have access to a clean drinking water, education and medical care, if their neighbourhoods are forcibly emptied, if they are condemned to a difficult life outside the normal system of state care, all those factors have a comprehensive and cumulative effect, which can be treated as persecution.

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The magazine EDNO is being published since 2008 under the motto 'one education for all'. In the period until 2010 it was being published monthly and it was financed by the Roma Educational Fund from Budapest.